Cosmeston Community Farm Business Plan

Tree Planting
A coastal footpath above the sea cliffs runs along the eastern boundary of the farm. The fields that face this eastern boundary would benefit from having trees planted along this boundary to shelter them from the sea breeze. Intuitively, it seems like a good idea to have 3 row of large trees next to the hedgerow of the footpath, with deciduous trees to the east and west of a central row of evergreen trees. This planting arrangement would be about 40m wide and 650m long, yielding about 2.6Ha of new forest that should be a planting priority.

Water
The closest the farm comes to a natural water supply is a small spring in the center of the farm, running down hill towards the coast. It might make sense to create either or both a wildlife pond and an irrigation reservoir in the south corner of the field immediately to the east of the Bay Caravan Park. Whether or not the irrigation reservoir is a good idea depends on how the cost would compare to that of a borehole. Water could be distributed across the site in pipes that crossed the roads on the old railway bridges.

Access
There is a mix use cycle track/footpath running along Lavernock Rd, and a public footpath following the old railway line from Cosmeston. The visibility requirements for a Vehicle access off either Fort Rd, or St Mary's Well Bay Rd will be much less onerous that creating a vehicle access of the faster Lavernock Rd. It would be desirable if this vehicle access could accommodate large articulated lorries, both for receiving deliveries, such as municipal green waste compost, and for produce distribution. Mary's Rd has a better entrance for large vehicles. Both roads have railway bridges with a maximum height of 4.1m, which is just a tad low for a standard lorry. This implies that the entrance to the logistics and distribution center of the farm should be north of these roads. It would seem sensible to locate a high production horticultural zone withing the curettage of the primary building. The field imediately to the east of Mary's Rd, and north of the old railway line, would seem like the most appropriate place for this. This access consideration starts to roughly locate a lot of the infrastructure, as this field would become the location of the primary building, as well as a composting facility or wormery, polytunnels, as well as a hub of internal access ways and the point from which we pump our irrigation water. This raises a critical question, which is, who owns the old railway line, and how easy would it be for us to install tracks that cross it.

Building
What functions do we want from our building or buildings?


 * Workshop
 * General storage
 * Cold Storage Warehouse
 * Loading Dock
 * Post Harvest Facility (washing, packing, etc)
 * Office
 * Staff Canteen
 * Toilets
 * Visitors Center
 * Plant Nursery
 * Protected Growing Space
 * Farm Shop/Restaurant
 * Food Processing Facilities
 * Renewable Energy Generation

Of course, many of these functions could be met by a well designed multi functional space.

Vegetable Production
Of the 280 acres of Cosmeston Farm, the western half is more suited to annual cropping. On this half, there is about 100 acres of land that could be treated as roughly equivalent for the sake of a horticultural rotation. I think it would be good to include a community of potential customers in a horticultural rotation. Customers could be given a form that looked something like this, where '0' represents that a vegetable is not in season, and people can enter a 1 into a cell to indicate that they would like to have that vegetable in that fortnight. The results of this customer survey could produce an outline cropping plan that looked something like this (I have not taken the time to change the numbers or crop names, but you get the idea): Assuming we produce something in the region of 3000 shares, we would need something in the region of 3000m2 of production poly tunnel space, excluding plant nursery space.

The bulk of our field crops would be established as transplants. We would produce transplants with a soil blocking and seeding machine, and plant them with a soil block transplanter. Weed management will be performed by a compact tractor. Ideally, we would have computer vision guided in row cultivator, though for this to be affordable we are relying on the open source horticultural robot project to have developed the software by 2023, which is feasible but not guaranteed. This is, of course, a radical simplification, but essentially, with these three pieces of equipment;


 * soil blocking and seeding machine
 * soil block transplanter
 * and in row cultivator

...in combination with...


 * a seed drill
 * spreader
 * flail mower
 * power harrow
 * tine cultivator
 * flame weeder
 * recoil irrigation
 * traveling boom automatic nursery irrigation
 * and a bunch of miscellaneous equipment such as crop covers, bamboo canes, seedling trays, etc,

...we should be able to manage cover crops, and establish and manage our crops with relatively low labor.

We could focus the support of a wider community on harvesting and distribution. There are several ways that we could organise this.


 * 1) Customers could harvest their own veg, in exchange for paying something like half price (say, £7.50/week for a £15/week portion). We could create systems that helped people organise into harvesting groups, such that if you were in a group of 5, you would harvest for 5 customers once every 5 weeks, then either deliver or be a collection point for the other 4 people in your group.
 * 2) We could have mass volunteer days, maybe twice a week, on which we invited a large group of people to the farm to help us harvest and pack vegetables, and send as much of the veg home with the volunteers as possible to make them collection points for other customers, then deliver to collection points where necessary.
 * 3) Some customers could pay other customers to harvest and deliver their vegetables.

Alternatively, we could invest in systems to mechanize and automate harvesting and distribution, which would enable us to pay a staff team to do this. This would involve a range of specialist harvesting machinery, a cold storage warehouse connected to a washing and packing room, including produce washing machines, pallet handling equipment, portioning machines, a vehicle loading doc and delivery vehicles.

This is a suggestion about how we could establish a large market garden. The proposal is essentially, that we focus our capital investment on crop establishment and weed management, and rely on the support of the customer community for harvesting and distribution. Alternatively, we could invest in our handling, storage and distribution first, then buy in vegetables and deliver veg boxes. We could then make phase 2, reinvesting our profits into our production system. A third option would be to raise enough money and build a big enough team that we can try and start the whole operation (production and harvesting and sales) all at once.

Things to consider regarding this decision.


 * Harvesting, sales and distribution will be around half the total labor of this business.
 * The capital investment costs required for a labor efficient operation do not scale in proportion to production. For example, if we had to invest £50,000 for equipment with the capacity to establish a certain amount of veg, we might get ten times the capacity for £100,000, an only need to invest £120,000 to do three times as much again. those figures are estimates for 100 boxes, 1000 boxes and 3000 boxes, respectively. Something similar is true for harvesting, storage, and distribution. Think, a van that allows us to deliver 1000 boxes doesn't cost ten times as much as the van that we need to deliver 100 boxes, and apply that principle to the root washer, leaf washer, portioning machine, pallet truck, cold store, etc.